Bank robber who only robbed on Thursdays jailed

A punctual New Jersey criminal who robbed banks every Thursday has been sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

Peter Bielecke pleaded guilty in June to one count of bank robbery, but also admitted five other holdups on consecutive Thursdays in January, February and March. He robbed banks in several cities including his hometown of Brick.

He didn't give a reason for choosing Thursdays - but authorities say the pattern made it a lot easier to track him.

The 40-year-old was arrested after a March 5 robbery in Old Bridge, New Jersey.

He'll serve five years and 10 months in prison, and also have to pay nearly $12,000 (around £7,400) in restitution under the sentence handed down on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Trenton.

Grenade-shaped cologne sparks emergency

A grenade-shaped bottle left under a busy bridge closed a major thoroughfare and brought police to investigate - only to discover that it contained French cologne.

The black bottle of Arsenal cologne by the design house of Gilles Cantuel looked realistic enough for police to halt rush-hour traffic Thursday morning.

The result was a three mile (5km) traffic jam in South America's biggest city - already known for its congested streets.

It wasn't clear if the bottle was left as a practical joke or for more sinister reasons, police investigator Renato Fernandes told the Globo news website.

Police have made no arrests in the case.

Police baffled as dozens of 'suicidal' cows throw themselves off cliff in the Alps

Dozens of alpine cows appear to be committing suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff near the small village in the Alps.

In the space of just three days, 28 cows and bulls have mysteriously died after they plunged hundreds of metres to rocks below where they were killed instantly.

In each case, local mountain rescue services using a helicopter had to be called in to remove the bodies because of the danger to the local groundwater of pollution.

A police spokesman said: 'There are no large carnivores living in the Alps anymore who would once have disposed of the bodies so they have to be moved.

We are investigating because cows growing up in the mountains normally can estimate dangers and do not plunge down cliffs.'

According to local reports, there had been violent thunderstorms in the area which may well have spooked the animals.

Cows wandering at high altitude are a common sight across much of the Alps, where farmers let them loose to graze on the green plateaus above the villages.

Often carrying large bells around their necks, most are dairy cows as the mix of vegetation and grasses at that high altitude are particularly good for milk and for making cheese.

Cows do occasionally fall to their deaths in these Alpine regions although it is rare for so many to fall in one particular place.

There has been speculation in the past that when this does happen it is because a tightly-grouped number have followed each other as they search for more grass.

Most scientists generally believe that animals are incapable of committing suicide.

Even lemmings, which by popular myth throw themselves off cliffs during mating season, do not take their own lives intentionally.

Instead, evolutionary pressures cause them to feel the urge to change habitat at which point they migrate in huge droves.

Sometimes, particularly in Scandinavia, they reach clifftops overlooking an ocean and, driven by the urge to cross a body of water, throw themselves off in order to swim to the other side.

They often die of exhaustion or drown as a result.

The myth came to the public's attention when a Disney wildlife film in the 1950s mocked up the lemming migration to make it look like the animals had committed suicide.

Michael Jackson's death homicide: Coroner

Michael Jackson's death has been declared a homicide by Los Angeles coroners as they revealed the singer had a lethal cocktail of six different drugs in his body when he died.

Ending several weeks of feverish speculation following Jackson's sudden death in Los Angeles on June 25, the county coroner's office issued a brief statement Friday ruling that the superstar's death was unlawful.

The statement said that while "acute intoxication" from the powerful anesthetic propofol was the primary cause of death, Jackson, 50, had also suffered from the effects of other drugs in his system.

As well as propofol, powerful drugs including lorazepam, midazolam, diazepam, lidocaine and ephedrine were found in Jackson's body.

The coroner's statement said police investigators and public prosecutors had ordered that the full toxicology report concerning Jackson be withheld until further notice.

Jackson's family welcomed the findings.

"The Jackson family again wishes to commend the actions of the coroner, the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies, and looks forward to the day that justice can be served," the family said in a statement.

The coroner's announcement will fuel speculation that authorities are likely to charge Jackson's personal physician Conrad Murray in connection with the death. Cardiologist Murray was the last person to see Jackson alive.

A lawyer for Murray issued a statement in response to Friday's announcement, saying the coroner's release "contains nothing new."

"For two months we have been hearing the same information, usually from leaks out of the coroner's office," attorney Ed Chernoff said in a statement.

"One has to wonder why the coroner felt compelled to release anything at all if the police investigation is not yet complete."

According to court documents unsealed in Houston, Texas, on Monday, multiple drugs were administered to Jackson by Murray in the hours before his death.

Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran "reviewed the preliminary toxicology results and his preliminary assessment of Jackson's cause of death was due to lethal levels of propofol."

Murray administered propofol and other drugs to Jackson -- at the star's insistence -- to treat his insomnia, but was worried Jackson had developed an addiction and "tried to wean Jackson off of the drug," the affidavit said.

Propofol is a powerful anesthetic used to induce unconsciousness in patients undergoing major surgery in hospital. Medical professionals say it should never be used by private individuals at home.

The affidavit unsealed on Monday revealed that Murray told investigators two days after the star died that he had been giving Jackson 50 milligrams of propofol nightly during the six weeks prior to the event.

As part of their investigation, police and federal agents have already raided Murray's offices in Las Vegas, Nevada and Houston, Texas, as well as a Las Vegas pharmacy that provided the drugs.

Murray told investigators he was not the first doctor to administer propofol to the King of Pop, who referred to the drug as his "milk," LAPD detective Orlando Martinez wrote in the affidavit, citing the cardiologist.

Medical experts said the cocktail of drugs apparently given to Jackson was extremely dangerous and police would need to determine whether administering it was tantamount to medical negligence.

"If all of these drugs... are also shown, this would be a classical case of acute combined drug toxicity," forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht told CNN.

Jackson is to be buried at a cemetery in Glendale, California on September 3, his family announced last week. They had originally planned to bury him on Saturday -- the day he would have turned 51.

Instead, Jackson's birthday will be a day for celebration and commemoration for fans around the world.

In New York's Brooklyn borough, crowds of up to 10,000 people are set to flock to a day of festivities marking the international superstar's birthday.

The borough's president is to declare the day Michael Jackson Day in Brooklyn, The New York Times reported, and Reverend Al Sharpton would open the festivities with a prayer.

The free celebration, organized by director Spike Lee, could be dampened somewhat by bad weather associated with Tropical Storm Danny, which is expected to bring heavy rains and strong winds to the US east coast Saturday.

100 Greatest Science Discoveries of All Time ~ #2: The Sun Is the Center of the Universe

What Is It? The sun is the center of the universe and the earth rotates around it.

Who Discovered It? Nicholaus Copernicus

Year of Discover? A.D. 1520

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

Copernicus measured and observed the planets and stars. He gathered, compiled, and compared the observations of dozens of other astronomers. In so doing Copernicus challenged a 2,000-year-old belief that the earth sat motionless at the center of the universe and that planets, sun, and stars rotated around it. His work represents the beginning point for our understanding of the universe around us and of modern astronomy.

He was also the first to use scientific observation as the basis for the development of a scientific theory. (Before his time logic and thought had been the basis for theory.) In this way Copernicus launched both the field of modern astronomy and modern scientific methods.

How Was It Discovered?

In 1499 Copernicus graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy; was ordained a priest in the Catholic Church; and returned to Poland to work for his uncle, Bishop Waczenrode, at the Frauenburg Cathedral. Copernicus was given the top rooms in a cathedral tower so he could continue his astronomy measurements.

At that time people still believed a model of the universe created by the Greek scientist, Ptolemy, more than 1,500 years earlier. According to Ptolemy, the earth was the center of the universe and never moved. The sun and planets revolved around the earth in great circles, while the distant stars perched way out on the great spherical shell of space. But careful measurement of the movement of planets didn’t fit with Ptolomy’s model.

So astronomers modified Ptolemy’s universe of circles by adding more circles within circles, or epi-circles. The model now claimed that each planet traveled along a small circle (epi-circle) that rolled along that planet’s big orbital circle around the earth. Century after century, the errors in even this model grew more and more evident. More epi-circles were added to the model so that planets moved along epi-circles within epi-circles.

Copernicus hoped to use “modern” (six teenth-century) technology to improve on Ptolemy’s measurements and, hopefully, eliminate some of the epi-circles.

For almost 20 years Copernicus painstakingly measured the position of the planets each night. But his tables of findings still made no sense in Ptolemy’s model.

Over the years, Copernicus began to wonder what the movement of the planets would look like from another moving planet. When his calculations based on this idea more accurately predicted the planets’ actual movements, he began to wonder what the motion of the planets would look like if the earth moved. Immediately, the logic of this notion became apparent.

Each planet appeared at different distances from the earth at different times through out a year. Copernicus realized that this meant Earth could not lie at the center of the planets’ circular paths.

From 20 years of observations he knew that only the sun did not vary in apparent size over the course of a year. This meant that the distance from Earth to the sun had to always remain the same. If the earth was not at the center, then the sun had to be. He quickly calculated that if he placed the sun at the universe’s center and had the earth or bit around it, he could completely eliminate all epi-circles and have the known planets travel in simple circles around the sun.

But would anyone believe Copernicus’s new model of the universe? The whole world—and especially the all-powerful Catholic Church—believed in an Earth-centered universe.

For fear of retribution from the Church, Copernicus dared not release his findings during his life time. They were made public in 1543, and even then they were consistently scorned and ridiculed by the Church, astronomers, and universities alike. Finally, 60 years later, first Johannes Kepler and then Galileo Galilei proved that Copernicus was right.

Fun Facts:

Approximately one million Earths can fit inside the sun. But that is slowly changing. Some 4.5 pounds of sunlight hit the earth each second.